On 7/17/2012 10:23 AM, Lipska the Kat wrote:
Well 'type-bondage' is a strange way of thinking about compile time type
checking and making code easier to read (and therefor debug
'type-bondage' is the requirement to restrict function inputs and output
to one declared type, where the type declaration mechanisms are usually
quite limited.
>>> def max(a, b):
if a <= b: return a
return b
>>> max(1,3)
1
>>> max(3.3, 3.1)
3.1
>>> max('ab', 'aa')
'aa'
>>> max([1,1], [1,0])
[1, 0]
and so on, indefinitely. How easy is it to write the same in Java?
Similarly, list.sort sorts any list as long as a < b works for all pairs
of items in the list.
Function max works for any two objects as long as 'a <= b' works. So the
'type' of a and b is 'mutually comparable with <='. How do you declare
that in Java? How do you declare the type 'non-negative number'? In
python, putting 'if input >= 0:' as the top effectively 'declares' that
input must be a number and greater than 0.
but I'm not about to get into some religious war about declaring a variables
type.
In Python, *all* data items have a class (type). Names in code do not
have a type. When they become data items, they are strings. 'Variable'
is a somewhat fuzzy term or concept in Python.
Since every object is an instance of some class, every class is a
subclass of class 'object', and an instance of a class is an instance of
all its classess superclasses; every object is an instance of 'object'.
So 'object' is the type of all inputs until further restricted. id(ob)
produces an integer for all objects. str(ob) is intented to produce a
string representation for all objects. The print functions calls str on
all its inputs.
I'll just say that I prefer to devote testing efforts to the real
danger area which in my experience is 'user' input.
Clients look dimly on runtime errors however they occur and if I can
leave it to the compiler to check as much as possible then I'll take that.
import ast
a = ast.literal_eval(input('enter a value: '))
b = ast.literal_eval(input('enter a comparable value: ')
try:
print('the max of those two is ', max(a,b))
except TypeError:
print(a, ' and ', b, ' are not comparable')
I suppose
Still, I'm sure you're only kidding around with me :-)
How easy was it to write max, or a universal sort in Java?
--
Terry Jan Reedy
--
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